The Widow & Her Hero (14 page)

I'm a bitch, she admitted. But I can't take this. I'm not
as game as you. I'm going back to England. And then we'll
see. Won't we, Gracie? We'll see.

It would turn out that Foxhill had been planning a rescue
operation, Memexit. But it had not got support from
others in IRD, who secretly believed the entire party were
dead or captured by Christmas.

It was all distressingly vague, and the bereaved hate
vagueness, especially if they don't know whether they're
really the bereaved or not. Dotty and I spent a miserable
Christmas together in the flat. My parents had invited me
home, the Foxhills had invited us to their table. But we
wanted to get it done with in our own company. I relieved
my depression by writing the poem
To the Beloved Missing
in Action
, but I didn't show it to Dotty, not then.

The New Year was a relief. Whether the war ended or
not, it would be the year in which something more
definite would emerge. The Germans surrendered as
expected, but no surrender was predicted for the
Japanese. Dotty went out with Colonel Creed now and
then, and I'd learn there was an affair. In a way, I envied
her the option.

Dotty and I were both working the morning the fiery
end to Japan's war came. Dotty called me and asked me to
a party at Colonel Creed's office, where – I discovered
when I arrived – the gin and Scotch flowed copiously, and
everyone kissed and did the hokey-pokey, the latest brainless
dance craze. Dotty and I were both edgy with hope and
dread. We would soon hear of our loves missing in action,
but we said nothing about it. That would have been to
provoke the savage gods who, for some, hung over the
coming of peace.

News did not come quickly. It was the Chinese driver of
one of the Japanese judicial officers who told an investigating
Australian that he had driven his master to the place
where the executions took place, a nondescript field of
weeds along Reformatory Road. He also said he had
exchanged a brief conversation in Mandarin with one of
the condemned men while they were still sitting and
standing near the bus which had brought them, and told
him to prepare himself for death, and that he should
consider telling the others the same. No, said the
condemned man – certainly Jockey Rubinsky – I know
already and they more or less know. The condemned man
was very brave, said the Chinese driver. They all were.
When the truth became apparent there was no pleading,
though a few of them retched from the smell of blood as
they were led blindfolded to the edge of one of the three
pits in which the earlier slaughtered lay. A month after the
end of the war, the Australians found the rough graves. Six
crosses had been put there – it seemed more as stage-
dressing and for appeasing effect rather than from true
respect.

The bodies were exhumed the next day. Two days later
and I knew. Rufus was not among the dead there. Leo and
my cousin Mel were. But another three days passed before
a Malay led the British to where Rufus had perished, it
seemed at first of wounds. I, half a week widowed myself,
became the consoler then.

We could have kept the flat in Melbourne indefinitely,
and we did stick on in that place booby-trapped by
memory until October, when Dotty used her influence
to get on one of the troopships returning to Britain after
delivering Australian soldiers home. There was a not quite
rational sense in which she was abandoning me, and
although neither of us raised the idea, it would sometimes
enter between us and make us awkward. I saw her off on
her troopship from Port Melbourne, and then packed up
quickly and went to Sydney, since it was to me a city unsullied
by events.

I was lucky to find a small flat and there, before Christmas,
I received a visit from a thin young officer named
Captain Gabriel, a survivor of Japanese imprisonment who
had now been given the duty of investigating the enemy's
crimes against Leo's party.

At the time I was trying to be brave for Leo's sake – Leo's
presence still so strongly abided that I would sometimes
forget that I had joined that venerable category known as
War Widow.

The first visit Captain Gabriel made was to tell me the
Japanese court martial that condemned Leo and the others
was specious, and investigations were afoot into its legality.
The general responsible, Okimasa, had suicided, and others
involved were under investigation for a number of crimes
as well as the killing of Leo and the rest of his party. And I
was nervous of Captain Gabriel, of how news he gave me,
and questions he asked, would impose on me revised duties
of grief and vengeance when I found it hard enough still to
bear the initial grief and anger of discovering Leo had been
executed. Gabriel himself remained earnest, dedicated and
analytical, seeming more haunted than angry. I was outraged
and consoled by one detail in particular. He told me
that he had interviewed a man named Hidaka, an interpreter
who seemed to have made friends with Leo and the
others, and had brought them sweets and tobacco right up
to the end. I could see them all sitting around, their jaws
swollen with Chinese lollies Hidaka gave them, Amanetto,
Yokan, Daifuku. This stood as a substantial item of mercy
in opposition to the blades of the Japanese NCOs' swords.

As for the rest I had been stopped in place by the news
of Leo's execution. The truth I was ashamed of was this: I
did not want any minor and peripheral information about
it all. What could adjust the fact? When I dared look at the
idea of execution, I was dazzled and disabled by its vibrant
blackness. Leo's body was irreparably violated. That reality
lay in the supposed paths of healing like an unnegotiable
boulder. My curiosity was paralysed, and there was something
in me that feared new knowledge, even if this state of
mind was a disgraceful thing in a widow.

Captain Gabriel visited me twice. The second time, in
1947, was to tell me the execution of Leo and other
Memerang men would not be the subject of a war trial, but
that various judicial officers, including the president of the
court, Sakamone, had killed themselves, and the NCOs
who did the work of execution, including the one who
made a botch of Leo, Judicial Sergeant Shiro Abukara,
were all in prison, Abukara for life, for other acts of cruelty
in Outram Road prison in Singapore. What could a war
crimes prosecution do about the mess the war had put us
in? All this war crimes work, which Gabriel would end up
spending three years on, and his superiors a half-dozen
years or more, was to me nothing but the sort of pottering
around the edge of a cauldron. Even two years after the
war, the shameful truth was that I was happy to let it,
them
,
all go. Since I was terrified that the more I heard, the more
likely I was to find out some terrible, indigestible reality,
I felt a bad wife.

I had been working as a secretary in the office of a
hotel broker named Laurie Burden. The business was one
his father had founded, and Laurie Burden had taken it
over in early 1946, after he returned from England, where
he had flown transport planes. He was a pensive young
man, and rarely took a drink. I liked working for him.
But I was aware of the entitlements of my widowhood,
including the chance of a university education. I wanted
to teach – it seemed that children, of whatever age, would
totally absorb my time. Without Leo, I wanted a new self-
definition. I felt that if I were stupefied and hypnotised in
place by events, as had happened for the past two years,
he would be posthumously displeased. Besides, I had a
horror of being stuck without company on that island of
widowhood – that description, War Widow, was so inadequate
an explanation for the woman Leo had let me
become.

Yet in another sense I suppose I unconsciously cultivated
widowhood, writing verse about it, some of which Dotty
got published in English literary mags. That poem of mine,
To the Beloved Missing in Action
, became a minor classic,
much anthologised.

I did my degree and teacher training. Laurie Burden had
remained my friend and attended the graduation. It was
not until 1952 when I was teaching English to high school
girls at North Sydney that we became lovers, not moving to
each other with the certainty which had been the mark of
my life with Leo, but more like two wounded creatures
trying not to hurt each other. For Laurie, as he ultimately
told me, had certain bewilderments too. He had toured
Germany with his father in 1935, a busman's holiday
during which they had visited all the leading hotels of
Cologne, Munich and Frankfurt. Flying into those cities on
transport missions, he had been appalled to find all the
splendour reduced to such absolute rubble. Earlier in the
war, he had had his own brush with heroes when he delivered
members of the specially trained leadership groups
whose job was to gather Maquis units into powerful
garrisons in the countryside. The fortified positions were
prematurely taken up and were reduced by the enemy with
great slaughter, from which few survivors emerged. Laurie
lacked the urge to march through Sydney with his former
comrades on Anzac Day because he did not see how it
would help or even enlarge the spirits of the doomed
fellows he had delivered to France.

I had been at work as a teacher for a few months when
a woman named Rhonda Garnish, an angel of great inconvenience,
visited me. The dreary and deadly Korean War
was still going, nuclear threat pressed down from the sky
and challenged our innocence, and the past war, vividly
recalled by millions of its victims, was nonetheless on its
way to becoming historical, an item of study.

Mrs Rhonda Garnish descended on me from the
Northern Rivers mail train. She had called me from the
north coast, near Grafton, and said she needed to see me,
and we made arrangements. I met her in Spit Road,
Mosman, as she got down from the bus from town. She
was a small woman, very pretty, with a plumpness which
might take over in later years but which had a long way to
go before it smudged her good looks. She managed her port
tied up by two leather straps with a wiry strength, and
when I shook hands with her, I could tell by the raspiness
of her palm that she was a dairy farmer's daughter.

But she was smart.

Listen, Grace, she told me on the street, holding me by
both wrists, don't let me talk you around. Just because I'm
going to Canberra it doesn't mean you have to. This is the
right time for me to go, that's all.

All right, I told her. We'll talk about it at home.

Hey, I saw that write-up of your book of poetry in the
Herald
. Crikey. They thought the world of you. It made me
think twice before I wrote you a letter. There's another
woman too, Mrs Danway.

I don't know her, I protested.

Rhonda said, Her husband was Hugo Danway. He wasn't
on the first one, Cornflakes. He arrived over in Western
Australia just in time to join them on the second trip.

Danway. Yes, I recognised the name.

He was one of the group, I said.

Yes, the Japanese beheaded him too. I'm going to visit
her, but don't let me drag you along. As my husband says,
I'm a bossy cow.

I took her home to my little flat – I had not yet married
Laurie and the proprieties were observed. I'd made a cake
for her, and she ate heartily, and drank her tea strong and
black and with three sugars.

You see, what happened, she told me, was I was engaged
to Pat Bantry. Did your husband ever mention him?

Yes, I lied.

I had a crush on him since I was thirteen. I'd be getting
ready for school and I'd see Pat drive the old Bantry
Hupmobile full-pelt down our hill and over the wooden
bridge, and all the timbers of the bridge would slam
together in protest. I can't hear that sound to this day
without my heart missing a go.

My hands were sweating. What did she want, this young
wife from the Northern Rivers, who had a perfectly good
husband at home in Aldavilla, and had left him to cook his
own meals and patiently keep her bed warm, and all to
chase ghosts? I had let her into my house for Leo's sake, for
the sake of his honour, for which as a good widow I was
supposed to be hungry. Rhonda Garnish went on extolling
Pat Bantry as the ultimate cow-cocky and bushman. The
corn up on the Clarence River grew eighteen feet tall, she
said, but Pat harvested the Bantry crop as well as Rhonda's
father's. She and her brother had helped him when he
offered to rebuild the floodgate on Sawpit Creek, and he
brought along a picnic in a sugar bag – he must have looted
the Bantrys' kitchen pantry.

Pat would often go bush, cutting tea-tree, and he'd cart
it in for Mr Bantry's distilling plant. Mr Bantry was from
Ireland, she told me, and knew all about distilling, but he
was a great admirer of tea-tree oil, which he called 'The
Australian Panacea', and sold at agricultural fairs up and
down the Northern Rivers.

Bantry seemed the ultimate Australian, even though he'd
been born in Ireland and come here as a child. On top of
all else, he'd gone cutting sleepers and bridge-bearing
timbers with Rhonda's uncle, who said he was the most
cheerful of company in the bush camp, and never swore
but had as much wit as most swearers. Furthermore, this
bush paragon had broken in a small team of steers and
used them to snig a fence strainer, thus becoming an invaluable
friend to every farmer on Sawpit Creek. And when the
war brought petrol rationing, Pat had easily converted the
Hupmobile into a kerosene burner.

These were the polished feats which had enchanted
the young Rhonda. Everyone, Rhonda included, had been
astonished when Pat volunteered early in the war. There
was a story that a recruiting sergeant managed to get
abstemious Pat full of bombo in Grafton (Leo's home
town, by the way). It might have been a version Pat wanted
spread, since old Mr Bantry was not a lover of the British
Empire in itself. When Pat vanished to North Africa,
Rhonda hung on news of him. He was a member of
the Sixth Divvy, that fabled division. After defeating the
Italians, they moved up to Syria and beat the Vichy French,
before returning to Libya to face Rommel.